KÜÇÜK VE ORTA ÖLÇEKLİ İŞLETMELERDE ISO 9001:2015 KALİTE YÖNETİM SİSTEMİ UYGULAMALARININ DEĞERLENDİRİLMESİ: KAYSERİ İLİ ÖRNEĞİ

ÖZ: Bu çalışmanın amacı, özellikle en son sürümüyle gelen yenilikler çerçevesinde, ISO 9001:2015 Kalite Yönetim Sisteminin (KYS) KOBİ’lerde ne derece etkin uygulandığını araştırmak ve sistemin uygulanmasına yönelik zorlukları ortaya koymaktır. Çalışmada, Kayseri’de faaliyet gösteren 22 KOBİ’de ISO 9001:2015 KYS uygulamaları incelenerek, standarttaki yeni kavram ve konulara uyum sağlama durumları, karşılaştıkları uygunsuzluklar ve uygulamada yaşadıkları zorluklar özelinde değerlendirmeler yapılmıştır 1 . Bu kapsamda, araştırmanın güvenirliğini doğrulayacak şekilde verileri toplamak için, önceden tanımlı bir görüşme protokolü izlenerek görüşmeler gerçekleştirilmiştir. Yarı yapılandırılmış soru formu aracılığı ile elde edilen nitel veriler, tanımlayıcı istatistikler ve içerik analizi yöntemi ile bulgulara dönüştürülmüştür. Çalışmada KOBİ’lerin ISO 9001:2015 standardının şartlarına uyumu açısından firma ölçeğine göre farklılaşan uygulamalar görülmüştür. KOBİ’lerin büyüklüğü arttıkça ISO 9001 standardında yapılan değişikliklere verilen tepkiler olumlu karşılanmış ve uygulamaların etkinliği artmıştır. Daha çok kalite yönetim sisteminde süreç yaklaşımının uygulanması, liderlik ve taahhüt, yetkinlik, farkındalık, iç denetim ve risk ve fırsatları belirleme ile ilgili uygunsuzlukların yaşandığı gözlenmiştir. KOBİ’lerde standardın uygulanmasını zorlaştıran faktörler arasında, ISO 9001 standardındaki kavramların kişilerce farklı yorumlanabilmesi, çok fazla dokümantasyon gerektirmesi, çalışanların standardın önemini bilmemesi, motivasyon eksikliği, standart ile ilgili eğitimlerin yetersizliği ilk sıralarda yer almıştır. Çalışma, KOBİ yöneticilerine, uygulayıcılara ve araştırmacılara ISO 9001:2015 KYS şartlarının uygulanmasına ilişkin önemli sonuçlar sunmaktadır. ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study is to investigate how effectively the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System is implemented in SMEs within the framework of the updates (e.g., risk based thinking) that came with its latest version and to reveal the challenges for the implementation of the system. In the study, it was also aimed to explain why SMEs need a quality management system and to develop suggestions for improvements that can be made to increase the success of the implementation. In the study, ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System applications were examined in 22 SMEs operating in Kayseri province, and their adaptation to the new concepts and issues in the standard, the nonconformities and the difficulties they encountered in practice were evaluated. In this context, interviews were conducted accordance with a predefined interview protocol to collect data, thereby validating the reliability of the research. Qualitative data collected via a semi-structured questionnaire were transformed into findings with descriptive statistics and content analysis. In this study, on the basis of new concepts and themes introduced with the ISO 9001:2015 version, especially such new themes as "business planning and strategic direction", "process risk", "product and service risk", "risk associated with the control of externally provided process, product and service" were examined in detail through PDCA cycle and identified the extent to which these themes were applied in SMEs with evidences. In terms of adaptation of SMEs to these changes, different practices were observed according to firm scale. As the size of SMEs increased, the reactions to the changes in the ISO 9001 standard were welcomed and the effiency of the implementation increased. It was observed that there were nonconformities in the implementation of the process approach in the quality management system, leadership and commitment, competence, awareness, internal audit and determining risks and opportunities. The challenges experienced by SMEs in applying and maintaining the standard were determined as follows: Different interpretation of the concepts in the ISO 9001 standard by individuals, too much documentation, lack of awareness for the importance of the standard, lack of motivation, and inadequacy of Standard training. The study provides important findings for SME managers, practitioners, and researchers interested in implementing ISO 9001:2015 QMS requirements

Text analytics on MOOCs. A comprehensive analysis of emotions

The value of diversity in education is highly emphasized in recent years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, by many scholars. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have aided the evolution of online learning by broadening the range of learning opportunities available. They have gained popularity, especially in higher education by providing unlimited access to lectures and rich learning materials by renowned and respected academics in a wide variety of areas, with no restrictions and at very low fees. Furthermore, learners' motivations for enrolling in a MOOC may vary depending on their choices for the course's instructional design as well as their emotions. Knowing this, the development of more effective online courses that address affective concerns would appeal to a wider audience and improve the learning experience. This research aims to uncover the emotional characteristics of MOOCs to better understand why learners choose a specific course among hundreds of options available on MOOC sites. For extracting the learners' emotions from user reviews, the study used Kansei Engineering approach, which is enhanced with text analytics techniques. The research methodology entails gathering reviews from MOOCs and analyzing them using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to discover Kansei words that characterize MOOCs, notably for courses in the discipline of Data Science. The expected output of this study is a Kansei corpus for online courses in this discipline

REAL OPTIONS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS

Many sources such as the immaturity, complexity and unpredictable evolution of the technologies themselves, and the difficulty of predicting the market demand generally cause uncertainty in the Information Technology (IT) projects. Managerial flexibility has value in the context of uncertain IT projects, as management can continuously gather information about uncertain project and market characteristics and, based on this information, change its course of action. As traditional capital budgeting (or project appraisal) approaches fail to consider embedded managerial flexibility in projects, the new investment evaluation approach called "real options" has come on the scene recently. "Options thinking," an emerging investment management philosophy based on the theory of financial options can provide a promising foundation for hedging the risks under uncertainty. This paper aims at analyzing a real IT investment having growth opportunities by using real options approach. Specifically, the value of investing in a software project as well as embedded flexibility in this opportunity is modeled as an option contract. The expected costs required for completing the project and thereafter the resulting asset value are considered as the base-case parameters of this contract. Option values derived from Binomial method are used for evaluating the project and the optimal investment policy is determined based on these values. As a result, it is shown that the value of an IT project having flexibility can differ from one obtained with traditional capital budgeting methods and a rejected project which was seen as unprofitable before can turn a profitable one through embedded flexibilities. Çoğu zaman teknolojilerin olgunlaşmamış olması, karmaşıklığı, bu teknolojilerin kendilerinin tahmin edilemez gelişimi ve pazar talebini önceden tahmin etmenin zorluğu gibi nedenler Bilişim Teknolojisi (BT) projelerinde belirsizliğe neden olmaktadır. Belirsiz proje ve pazar karakteristikleri hakkında sürekli bilgi toplayabilen ve bu bilgiye dayalı olarak kararlarını ve aksiyonlarını revize edebilen bir yönetim söz konusu ise, yönetsel esneklik, belirsiz BT projeleri bağlamında bir değere sahiptir. Geleneksel sermaye bütçeleme (ya da proje değerleme) yöntemleri, projelerde gizli olan bu yönetsel esnekliği doğru değerleyemediğinden, son zamanlarda "reel opsiyonlar" olarak adlandırılan yeni bir değerleme yaklaşımı ortaya çıkmıştır. Finansal opsiyon teorisine dayanan bir yatırım yönetimi yaklaşımı olarak "opsiyonlarla düşünme", projelerdeki belirsizlik durumlarında risklerden korunmayı sağlayabilir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, büyüme esnekliğine sahip gerçek bir BT yatırımını reel opsiyonlar yaklaşımı ile analiz etmektir. Spesifik olarak, bir yazılım projesine yatırım yapmanın ve bu fırsatın barındırdığı esnekliklerin değeri, bir opsiyon sözleşmesi olarak modellenmiştir. Bu sözleşmede, temel alınan durum değişkenleri olarak, projenin tamamlanması ile elde edilen varlığın değeri ve projeyi tamamlamanın beklenen maliyeti söz konusudur. Binom yaklaşımına dayalı olarak elde edilen opsiyon değerleri, projenin değerlendirilmesinde dikkate alınmış ve bu değerlere bağlı olarak optimal yatırım politikası belirlenmiştir. Sonuç olarak, bir BT projesinin barındırdığı esnekliklere bağlı olarak değerinin, geleneksel sermaye bütçeleme yöntemleri ile elde edilen değerden daha farklı olabileceği ve kazançsız görülüp reddedilen bir projenin bu esnekliklerle daha karlı bir projeye dönüşebileceği gösterilmiştir

Text Mining as a Supporting Process for VoC Clarification

In product development, the foremost issue is to identify "what" the customers' expectations would be from the product. As a promising approach to the product development, Quality Function Deployment also gives crucial importance to the collection and analysis of Voice of the Customer (VoC) to deduce true customer needs. Data sources of VoC include surveys, interviews, focus groups, gemba visits as well as customer reviews which can be collected through call centers, internet homepages, blogs, and microblogs in social networks. Customers' verbatim or reviews obtained from these resources require more detailed extraction to define them as the positive restatement of problems, opportunities or image issues independent of the product or the solution. Basically, this clarification process is a content analysis in which the developers usually seek to extract and classify the spoken-unspoken customer needs from VoC. This labor-intensive manual approach brings subjectivity to the analysis and can take so much time in the case of having condensed and large-volume text data. During the past decade, the field of text mining has enabled to solve these kinds of problems efficiently by unlocking hidden information and developing new knowledge; exploring new horizons; and improving the research process and quality. This paper utilizes a particular algorithm of text clustering, a recently popular field of interest in text mining, to analyze VoC and shows how text mining can also support the clarification process for better extraction of customer needs. Practical implications are presented through analysis of online customer reviews for a product

Bilişim Teknolojisi Projelerinde Reel Opsiyonlar (Real Options in Information Technology Projects)

Many sources such as the immaturity, complexity and unpredictable evolution of the technologies themselves, and the difficulty of predicting the market demand generally cause uncertainty in the Information Technology (IT) projects. Managerial flexibility has value in the context of uncertain IT projects, as management can continuously gather information about uncertain project and market characteristics and, based on this information, change its course of action. As traditional capital budgeting (or project appraisal) approaches fail to consider embedded managerial flexibility in projects, the new investment evaluation approach called “real options” has come on the scene recently. “Options thinking,” an emerging investment management philosophy based on the theory of financial options can provide a promising foundation for hedging the risks under uncertainty. This paper aims at analyzing a real IT investment having growth opportunities by using real options approach. Specifically, the value of investing in a software project as well as embedded flexibility in this opportunity is modeled as an option contract. The expected costs required for completing the project and thereafter the resulting asset value are considered as the base-case parameters of this contract. Option values derived from Binomial method are used for evaluating the project and the optimal investment policy is determined based on these values. As a result, it is shown that the value of an IT project having flexibility can differ from one obtained with traditional capital budgeting methods and a rejected project which was seen as unprofitable before can turn a profitable one through embedded flexibilities

IMPROVEMENT TOOLBOX DESIGN FOR EFQM CRITERIA

The EFQM Excellence Model is a framework that helps organizations to achieve competitive advantage by measuring where they are on their path to excellence. However, it does not tell the organization what to do or how it should manage any of these areas. In this study, we suggest a structure to overcome this gap. We present a method, matrix reflections, to find a tool set that can be used for designing improvement approaches in order to reach desired results

Development of a Comprehensive Process for Introducing Game-Based Learning in Higher Education for Lecturers

Emerging trends such as digitalization, globalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic are forcing higher education institutions to undergo constant organizational and technological changes and to introduce innovative pedagogical approaches suitable for teaching a new generation of students—the so-called digital natives. The goal of this paper is to engage in the ongoing debate in higher education about new teaching methods, i.e., game-based learning methods, which meet the needs of digital natives. They have grown up in a fast-paced, technology-driven society, which has affected how they absorb information, their ability to concentrate for extended periods, and their motivation and engagement in the learning process. Existing research suggests that implementing the game-based learning method can be very difficult and costly, as it often requires adapting the freely available game to the requirements of the particular course and additional investment in purchasing appropriate equipment. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive procedure for introducing a cost-effective game-based learning method in higher education, which includes thirteen steps to help lecturers introduce game-based activities straightforwardly into their teaching processes. In addition, we also present security, cultural, and quality assurance issues that need to be considered when implementing game-based learning in higher education